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Friday, January 14, 2011

It is with great sadness we announce that Trish Keenan from Broadcast passed away at 9am this morning in hospital. She died from complications with pneumonia after battling the illness for two weeks in intensive care.

Our thoughts go out to James, Martin, her friends and her family and we request that the public respect their wishes for privacy at this time.

This is an untimely tragic loss and we will miss Trish dearly - a unique voice, an extraordinary talent and a beautiful human being. Rest in Peace.

Formed in 1995, Keenan and James Cargill were the ever-presents in Broadcast, a band who sounded like the soundtrack to a movie about Stereolab. Which is, by the way, bloody brilliant.

The Keeping It Peel site has Trish talking about the first time they did a session for Radio 1, which also sums up the band wonderfully:

During a break from recording, we wondered through the corridors, peering through the windows of locked rooms, on a hunt for the Radiophonic Workshop. We came across abandoned tape machines and Shostakovich posters in the hallways and scratched our heads curiously at finding a rare EMS Vocoder sitting all lonely in the corner of a deserted foyer. It was wonderful to be free to walk around unquestioned.

"We hovered outside the locked Radiophonic room, a little disappointed by what we could see through the window - a couple of DX7s and stacked cardboard boxes. We contemplated unscrewing the Radiophonic Workshop name plate from the door and making off with it, but knew the stern-faced security guard from earlier would have been on to us."

Talking to the Milk Factory in 2003, Trish spoke about the sometimes slow process of translating the band's ideas into music:

What we also realised is that every brain filters information in a very different way. You could say to one producer something… A producer could say “yeah, I can do a wall of sound” for instance, his actual version of a wall of sound or the way he interprets it can be really different from yours. We’d end up arguing with these producers because they couldn’t do what they said they could.

But, boy, was it worth the struggle to capture it:

Trish Keenan had apparently been on life support since Christmas; H1N1 flu having turned to pneumonia.

It's a terrible loss, both for music and, more sharply, for her family and friends.